Man who betrayed Anne Frank to Nazis in bid to save own family is finally revealed

IT is without doubt one of the saddest and most enduring chilly circumstances of the twentieth century – who instructed the Nazis the place Anne Frank was hiding?

However now the 77-year thriller has been solved by a crack workforce of investigators, claims a brand new ebook on the wartime teenage diarist whose household had been betrayed to the Gestapo.

The perpetrator is surprisingly not a power-hungry Nazi however tragically, just like the Franks, a Jewish sufferer of the regime who was merely attempting to save lots of his family.

Arnold van den Bergh was a notary, or authorized clerk, who’s now believed to have instructed the SS the deal with of the Franks’ Amsterdam hideaway, Prinsengracht-263.

Rosemary Sullivan, writer of The Betrayal Of Anne Frank, stated: “Arnold van den Bergh was an individual put right into a satan’s dilemma by circumstances for which he was to not blame, and below stress, he could have failed to know totally the results of his actions.

“He didn’t flip over info out of wickedness or for self-enrichment, as so many others had. Like Otto Frank’s, his objective was easy — to save lots of his household.

“That he succeeded whereas Otto failed is a horrible truth of historical past.”

With their house metropolis of Amsterdam below Nazi rule, 13-year-old Anne, her dad and mom Otto and Edith and sister Margot went into hiding in 1942.

Together with household associates the van Pels and dentist Fritz Pfeffer, for 2 years they hid in a hid room behind the workplace of Otto’s spice enterprise.

Their location was recognized solely by Otto’s workers, Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, who risked their lives to carry them meals.

In 1944 German police stormed the places of work and the Franks, van Pels and Pfeffer had been despatched to Auschwitz focus camp in Poland.

Anne, Margot and Edith had been despatched on to Bergen-Belsen focus camp, the place they reportedly contracted typhoid and died in 1945.

Otto, the household’s sole survivor, returned to Amsterdam after the warfare and revealed Anne’s heart-rending diary of their time in hiding in 1947.

Within the Nineteen Forties and Sixties there had been two unsuccessful investigations into who had betrayed the Franks, then in 2016 a 22-strong workforce led by Vincent Pankoke, a former FBI chilly case specialist, started one other probe.

The workforce studied reviews from 29 archives in Holland and Allied international locations and used a Microsoft AI programme to analyse them.

ANONYMOUS NOTE

Then when Vincent was leafing via a 1963 report on Otto Frank he discovered a replica of an nameless observe given to Otto in 1945 which claimed to know who had handed them in.

It learn: “Your hideout in Amsterdam was reported on the time to the Jüdische Auswanderung [Jewish Emigration] in Amsterdam, Euterpestraat by A van den Bergh, a resident on the time at Vondelpark, O Nassaulaan.

“On the JA was an entire listing of addresses he submitted.”

Arnold van den Bergh had been one in all seven Jewish notaries in Amsterdam earlier than the warfare. His agency had been profitable, with Arnold presiding over high-value gross sales and residing in a lavish mansion within the metropolis.

He and spouse Auguste had twin daughters, Emma and Esther, and a youthful daughter Anne Marie — who was the identical age as Anne Frank.

Creator Rosemary continued: “He appeared to be a quiet however assured man.

“His spouse beloved to entertain visitors at their house, and he had a ardour for fantastic seventeenth and 18th-century work, a luxurious that his revenue afforded him.”

When the Nazis launched into their mass homicide of Jews throughout Europe, van den Bergh determined to do no matter it took to maintain his household protected.

In 1941, a yr after Germany invaded Amsterdam, he turned a founding member of the Jewish Council.

The council — reviled after the warfare — had the devastating job of deciding which Jews could be deported and held weekly conferences with the intelligence arm of the SS, the SD.

In return, van den Bergh and his household had been amongst 1,500 Dutch Jews given a “sperre”, or immunity from deportation.

However when the council was disbanded in 1943, members had been despatched to focus camps — that means van de Bergh was now not protected.

To the chilly case workforce the timings didn’t make sense. Why would van den Bergh hand over the Franks’ deal with in 1944 however not in 1943, when the lives of his household had been in essentially the most hazard?

POWERFUL ALLY

Checking information, the workforce discovered no proof that van den Bergh or his younger household had been ever held captive in focus camps.

As a substitute, van den Bergh’s subsequent transfer was to use for Calmeyer standing — an SS classification that means non-Jewish — on the premise that one in all his grandparents was a Gentile, that means that he and his household ought to as an alternative be recognized as Aryan, or non-Jewish.

In September 1943, his request was granted, and the entire household had the J — for Jüdisch, or Jewish — on their id playing cards scrubbed.

That ought to have assured their security — if it hadn’t been for an argument with the fallacious man. Round this time, van den Bergh’s enterprise had been taken off him and given to an Ayran notary, JWA Schepers.

Maybe infuriated by this humiliation, van den Bergh took steps to internally sabotage the enterprise in order that by the point Schepers took over, it was successfully inoperable.

This turned out to be a grave mistake. Schepers was so livid that he efficiently lobbied the SS to reverse the choice on van den Bergh’s Calmeyer standing.

Van den Bergh’s Aryan id was erased and he fled Amsterdam as a bounty was positioned on his head.

Rosemary stated: “The surreal absurdity of these bureaucratic musical chairs, when a person’s life and the lives of his household had been at stake, is a brutal instance of the Nazi technique of homicide by small bureaucratic cuts.”

The Dutch Resistance discovered houses for Van den Bergh’s twins in Scharwoude and homed 13-year-old Anne Marie in Amsterdam.

However Anne Marie, whose personal daughter Esther Kizio — a pseudonym— spoke to the chilly case workforce, fled Amsterdam after being starved, pressured to work and sexually assaulted.

She was promptly arrested in Rotterdam by the Nazis. However the van den Bergh household had yet one more card to play.

Throughout her interrogation, Anne Marie talked about her father’s German shopper, Alois Miedl, and was promptly launched.

FRIENDS WITH HIGH-RANK NAZIS

Miedl was a Catholic artwork collector who regardless of having a Jewish spouse, was good associates with high-ranking Nazis and had been quietly working for German navy intelligence.

After Jewish collectors had been pressured to promote their artwork through the Nazi persecution, Miedl had organized the sale of sure works to Hitler’s second in command, Hermann Goring.

The artwork had beforehand belonged to Jewish collector Jacques Goudstikker. And the notary who was concerned within the sale was none aside from Arnold van den Bergh. He should have realised that Miedl might be a strong ally.

So when Miedl, who secretly sympathised with the Jews, requested van den Bergh to absorb Goudstikker’s mom Emilie during the warfare, he agreed.

By now in Miedl’s good books, van den Bergh hoped his relationship with the Nazi occasion would maintain his household protected in hiding.

However in 1944 because the Germans began to lose the warfare, Miedl fled to fascist Spain. Plainly by this stage, van den Bergh was out of choices.

In a last-ditch try to save lots of himself and his household, he handed over an inventory of Jewish protected homes which he would have had as a member of the Jewish Council.

When his granddaughter Esther found this, she struggled to return to phrases with the information.

Rosemary stated: “If certainly her grandfather gave up the Prinsengracht 263 deal with, it was most likely simply an deal with on an impersonal listing — he didn’t know who was residing there.

“If in reality he had finished it, she stated lastly, she knew it may have been for just one purpose — as a result of he was pressured to, as a result of he needed to save his household’s lives.”

In 1948 an Amsterdam Jewish Honor Courtroom — a tribunal set as much as cope with Jewish suspected Nazi collaborators — discovered van den Bergh responsible in absentia of aiding in anti-Jewish measures.

Shortly after, he was recognized with throat most cancers and he died in London in 1950. However one query stays — why did Otto Frank maintain van den Bergh’s identify to himself?

HANDED OVER SAFE HOUSES

On the time of van den Bergh’s trial Otto instructed Dutch newspaper Het Parool: “We had been betrayed by Jews.”

And years later Miep Gies let slip to a scholar at a College of Michigan occasion that the betrayer had died “earlier than 1960”. However Otto stored the identify to himself till his loss of life aged 91 in 1980.

Rosemary wrote: “Maybe Otto’s lack of curiosity in exposing his betrayer could be put down, partly, to van den Bergh’s loss of life.

“What could be the purpose in pursuing a useless man? Otto all the time stated he didn’t wish to hurt the person’s youngsters.

“He additionally could have concluded that van den Bergh would develop into a handy scapegoat for Jew haters.”

•  The Betrayal Of Anne Frank, by Rosemary Sullivan, is revealed at the moment by William Collins, an imprint of Harper-Collins UK, in hardback, book and audio.

Oscar successful Helen Mirren tells the story of Anne Frank’s life via the pages of her world-famous diary in ‘Anne Frank: Parallel Tales’

Supply: Solar